This invention relates to pencil manufacturing processes and more particularly to a system for automatically applying paint to pencils from a pencil production line.
The pencil manufacturing industry has seen significant technological advances over the years toward the production of an improved, low-cost product. These advances have largely focused on the pencil forming aspect of the manufacturing process, including, for example, the manufacture of pencil casings and leads by plastic extrusion techniques and the development of more fully automated, high-output production equipment. Pencil painting technology, however, has seen relatively few truly major improvements and has lagged significantly behind production equipment technology.
Modern pencil manufacturing facilities still make wide use of basic painting techniques which have been known for many years. For example, one long-known technique which is still commonly relied upon by the industry involves a pencil painting system basically consisting of a pair of paint machines interconnected by two paint-drying conveyors. Each paint machine includes a pencil supply hopper, a paint reservoir and a pusher for feeding pencils from the hopper through the reservoir. One of the drying conveyors runs between the output of the reservoir of the first paint machine and the supply hopper of the second paint machine and the other drying conveyor is similarly disposed between the reservoir of the second paint machine and supply hopper of the first paint machine. With this arrangement, pencils may be cycled between the two paint machines until a desired number of coats of paint has been applied.
Despite their long-standing use in the industry, pencil painting systems of the foregoing type are inefficient and labor intensive--and therefore, costly. For example, to operate such a system, it is necessary that factory personnel manually load a supply of pencils in the hopper of at least one paint machine and thereafter, upon completion of paint application, that the pencils be manually removed from the paint machine hoppers. This introduces delay in the manufacturing process, and a considerable number of systems may consequently be required to avoid a bottleneck in plant operations--particularly where modern, high-output pencil production equipment is being used. Naturally, the use of a large number of painting systems results in increased capital, maintenance and labor costs, and further wastes valuable in-plant floor space which could be utilized advantageously for other purposes.
It is appartent that an inexpensive, compact, and efficient pencil painting system which is compatible with today's high-output production equipment would be of great value to the pencil manufacturing industry. The present invention provides such a system.